Leslie Charteris - The Saint Meets His Match

IF It had been possible to prepare a place-time chart of the activities of the Angels of Doom, it would have shown, during the eighteen hours following Simon Templar's departure from the house in Belgrave Street, a distinct concentration of interest in the region of Upper Berkeley Mews, where the Saint had converted a couple of garages, with the rooms above, into the most ingeniously comfortable fortress in London. Also, like other concentrations of the Angels of Doom, it appeared to be conducted with considerable labour and expense for no prospect of immediate profit.

It may be suggested that the district of Mayfair was an eccentric situation for the home of a policeman; but Simon Templar thanked God he wasn't a real policeman. In fact, he must have been the weirdest kind of policeman that ever claimed to be attached to Scotland Yard. But attached he indisputably was, and could claim his official salutes from some of the men who would once have given their ears to arrest him. "Thus are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of walloping perished," he said to Teal at another lunch, with a kind of wicked wistfulness; and the detective sighed, and kept his misgivings to himself. For the Saint, in his new disguise of a respectable citizen, seemed much too good to be true — much too good… Teal had an uneasy feeling that no bad man who had suddenly reformed would have been quite so overpoweringly sanctimonious about it. All that he had ever seen of the Saint, all that he had ever known of him, made Chief Inspector Teal feel like a performing elephant dancing a hornpipe over a thin glass dome in the presence of this inexplicable virtue. And in his mountainously bovine way Chief Inspector Teal watched the Saint enforcing the law by strictly legal methods, and wondered…

Not that anyone's mystification would have worried Simon Templar in the least. If he had thought about it at all, he would have been impishly amused, in his serenely contented fashion. As it was, he went on with his life, and the job he had taken on, with a sublime disregard for the feelings and opinions of the world at large, seeming to be distressed only by the lack of an adequate supply of victims for his exaggerated sense of humour.

One thing, however, could disturb his tranquillity, and that was to have business troubles intruded upon the hours which he had allotted to himself for rest or recreation. At midnight of the day after his visit to Belgrave Street, for instance, when he was sitting up in bed, happily engaged in polishing the opening lines of a new song dealing with the shortcomings of the latest Honours List, and a bullet smacked through the window behind him and chipped a lump out of a perfectly good ceiling, he was distinctly bored.

With a sigh he climbed out and pulled on his dressing gown. One glance at the line between the star-shaped split in the window and the scar in the plaster was enough to show that the shot had come in at a wide angle. The Saint sighed again. Perhaps his estimate of himself had been wrong, It seemed that there was something else which annoyed him even more than to be interrupted after business hours — and that was to be taken for a fool.

He glanced round the room and selected a battered pickelhaube — relic of a grimmer warfare than that. Then he switched off the light. Returning to the window, he knelt down so, that he was below the level of the sill, and raised the lower sash. On one side of this opening he displayed the pickelhaube, looped over the back of a chair which he edged into position with his foot, and awaited developments with a kindly interest.

The mews was deserted, and there were no pedestrians visible at the entrance in Berkeley Square at that moment, but he could pick out the shadowy bulk of a big saloon car parked in the cul-de-sac of the mews itself, and the second shot from it impinged accurately upon the pickelhaube with a noise like that of a dull gong.

Neither of the shots from outside had been accompanied by a report, but Simon Templar, since acquiring the right to be as noisy as he pleased, had ceased to be of such a retiring disposition. He emptied his automatic without stealth, and crammed in a fresh magazine as he raced down the stairs.

His servant met him in the hall.

"Count ten, and then open the front door — but lie flat on the ground when you do it!" snapped the Saint, and vanished into the sitting room without explaining how this feat of contortion was to be performed.

He was edging back the window curtains when the door began to open.

He had no fear for the man who was opening it, for there were so few flies on Orace that even a short-sighted man would have had no excuse for mistaking him for a Chilean mule. Neither had he any fear of the agile gunman who was upsetting his evening. Either the car was an ordinary car, in which case the gunman was winged if Simon Templar had ever learnt anything about the art of shooting up automobiles; or the car was an extraordinary car, lined throughout with half-inch nickel steel, in which case the gunman was probably not winged. And, either way, if it came to a fight.

"Joke!" murmured the Saint, and lowered his head again quickly.

Ordinary guns he was prepared for, and ready to take on any time. Not that he particularly fancied himself with guns, but he reckoned he could just about pull his weight in most kinds of rough stuff. But there was another kind of gun before tackling which Simon Templar always paused to take a deep breath and recite rapidly the verse from the hymn which contains a line about shelters from the stormy blast; and it was undoubtedly a specimen of that kind of gun which was spluttering a horizontal hailstorm of lead sufficiently close to his direction to be appreciably unpleasant.

Taking the breath, and postponing the recitation to a later date, Simon put up his head again; and as he did so the fire ceased, and the car picked up speed with a rush and swooped into the emptiness of Berkeley Square.

The Saint, standing at the corner of the mews and trying to draw a bead on one of the departing tires as the car turned into Mount Street, was briskly arrested.

"Don't be a bigger fool than you can help," he snarled; and the constable, recognizing him, released him with a stammered apology.

"It was a car, sir—"

"You amaze me," said the Saint, in awe. "I thought it was a team of racing camels. Get the number down in your book."

The policeman obeyed; and Simon, with a shrug,turned and shouldered his way back to the house through the nucleus of a gaping crowd.

He found Orace dabbing an ear with a stained handkerchief.

"Hurt?"

"Nossir — just a splinter er wood. They were firin' low."

"It's more painful through the stomach," said the Saint enigmatically, and went on upstairs.

The pursuit of the car from which the machine gun had been fired wasn't Simon Templar's business. It could be carried on just as effectively by the regulars — or just as ineffectively, for the number plates were certain to have been changed. But it made the Saint think.

When the assistant commissioner called in later for the story, however, Simon showed no signs of perturbation.

"It was Budd's idea, of course. He's seen service in Chicago. But machine guns in the streets of London are nothing new on me — I've had it happen before. There's no blamed originality in this racket, that's the trouble."

"They seem to think you're important."

"There's certainly some personal bias against me," admitted the Saint innocently. "I was expecting a demonstration — I had further words with Jill Trelawney yesterday. Cigarette?"

"Thanks."